Web X.0

Plaxo... Ugh...

Plaxo is one of my favorite online services (I know I'm pretty lonely at that...) [1]. If you peel away the spam issues they had, etc - the core idea is pretty powerful:

If historically I had to maintain and keep up-to-date the contact info of 100's of people in my address book, with Plaxo I could instead worry about the contact info of just a single person - myself.
Plaxo would do the rest keeping my friends up-to-date on my contact info automatically, and vice versa.

The only real issue was how to bring enough people onto the platform to make it meaningful for everyone. But as this service is extremely viral (the more friends I bring into Plaxo, the easier it gets to maintain *my* address book) - that took care of itself and millions of people now use Plaxo.

Being THE address book synchronizer of the world is a very powerful position to be in, but it seems like that's the point where Plaxo started fumbling on its strategy (of course now that I say that, Microsoft will probably acquire them next week for $1B and I will look totally stupid... whatever...).

Instead of focusing on its core strategy - being the world's address book sync'er -  they started copying and dog-chasing the flavor-of-the-day companies and tried to become Facebook. I don't get the whole Plaxo Pulse thing... why do I need to 'friend' again the people that I already 'friended' within Plaxo when we exchanged our business cards? And once I do that 2nd friending process - what value am I supposed to get?! It's clear that Plaxo got valuation-envy from Facebook and decided to go in its footsteps. The trouble with that, is that you can only copy what's already out in the open... if the strategy is not genuinely *your own* strategy, then you have no idea what to do next and why to do it. Which means that almost by definition, if you're copying someone else's successful strategy you're almost doomed to fail. The proof - Pulse is a pathetic copycat of Facebook that adds absolutely zero value (to the user at least... who knows - if they can spin this to some stupid acquirer it might end up adding a lot of value to them...). Last week they even tried to start scraping data out of Facebook (violating FB's T&C's...) and use it within Pulse. Ugh...

Now it seems like they're shopping themselves for $100M. It's sad to see because this is one rare example of a product that made total sense, which could have made a ton of $$'s by sticking to its core strategy and not trying to copy others. Here's what I think Plaxo should have done. I offered these ideas to Todd, their co-founder, a couple of years back. But since they obviously chose to become Facebook2, I'll publish it here. Feel free to take it and build a $1B company out of it:

Plaxo pretty much perfected the product for syncing contact info between me and *my friends*. The next step, and where the honey pot lies, is to let me sync my contact info between me and *businesses* I have a relationship with.

Think about the simple case of moving to a new apartment. It's a huge headache for me to update all the banks I use, magazines I subscribe to, insurance companies, etc, etc. It takes months to get all of them updated. It's a similar, or even bigger, nightmare for all those businesses that need to stay in touch with me. They need to put systems and people in place to manage their contact databases, they need to hunt down people after mail is returned or calls aren't answered, etc, etc.

Introduce "Plaxo for Businesses", and let me share my Plaxo info with businesses the way I do with friends. A business would have to be insane not to pay say $5-per-year-per-client to automatically and permanently maintain a perfect contact record of each of its clients. A magazine that's printed, shipped and returned probably costs more than $5... If it makes sense for a magazine, it would make sense for pretty much any other business.

It's rare to have a product that would make so useful for the end user, and would also be so attractive for businesses to pay for [2]. And as this is one of those winner-take-all type of platforms, there ain't going to be much space for more than 1-2 major players. Plaxo was (and still is, if it wakes up) in a great position to become the world's address book syncronizer. It might be less sexy than being 17th Facebook, but I think it's a MUCH better business to be in as the leader. If Plaxo lets this opportunity slip, it'll be Microsoft (or maybe Yahoo Mail or Gmail/OpenSocial) that takes this. Again. I'd hate to see that happen... :-(

===
[1] Actually - to get this absolutely correct - the app I really loved was Contact.com which was released way before Plaxo even existed ('98 or '99 I think). Contact.com was founded by Eyal Herzog, one of the smartest Israeli web entrepreneurs who went on to start MetaCafe later.  Contact.com was one of the best internet apps ever, and unfortunately it was waaay ahead of its time.

[2] Is this what Doc Searls refers to as VRM?

Pop-up blockers blockers

I use Firefox, with Yahoo and Google toolbars installed. I also occasionally use IE7 (directly, or via the wonderful IE Tab extension). And I have a bunch of anti-virus, anti-adware, anti-spyware, etc programs installed.

When the first pop-up blockers were introduced, they were great. But with ~10 different applications all attacking those poor helpless pop-ups, I'm finding that this once useful tool is becoming a real nuisance. The reason: On those few sites where I actually do want pop-ups to pop I now need to go and disable (or white-list) 10 different apps and toolbars.

I thought there must be a solution for this growing pain, but couldn't find any. So here you go with a free idea - feel free to take it and build your next mega-business with it.

The idea is to develop a Pop-Up Blocker Blocker. As the name implies - once installed, this software would block all the pop-up blockers from doing their thing for a given website.

I think this can be huge.

Movie Theatres 2.0

A little known fact is that I have a private, full-sized theater. Actually five theaters. I don't technically own them... Regal Entertainment does and is gracious enough to operate them exclusively for me and my family.

Or at least that's the impression I get. In nearly all movies we go to, we seem to have the whole theater pretty much to ourselves. I might be missing something in Regal's business plan, but it seems to me awfully hard to sustain that huge operation just for an occasional visit of the 4 of us (well, I admit - the price we pay for a single bucket of pop-corn does probably cover a month's rent and then some).

There are 100 reasons why theaters are bleeding audience (DVD's, TiVo's, VOD, Netflix, etc, etc). But I think at the core it all boils down to the fact that the scheduling of movies in theaters totally sucks. The movies playing in theaters at any given day are determined by some anachronistic distribution structure that was conceived ~80 years ago, an era in which content (and film reel distribution) were in short supply, and audiences were abundant.

This is flipped by 180⁰ today: content (and distribution means) are abundant, and audience attention is extremely scarce. This requires flipping the distribution model by 180⁰ too.

Here's an idea that I'm hereby contributing to the movie theater industry, free of charge:

• Launch a website where people can signup with their zip code.
• Hook up to IMDB (or the likes), and let people browse a catalog of movies.
• Let each registered user check the movies they're interested in seeing in theater format.
• As soon as a movie reaches X number of interested viewers, the system will find an open screening slot for the next 1-2 weeks.
• An automated email would go out to all those that signed up for that movie.

There are probably about 50 movies I can think of which I missed when they were first playing in theaters and I'd love to see on the big screen. Probably about another 100 which I'd be happy to see again in theater format. And probably about 500 others that I can't even remember right now.

Imagine being able to go out to the movies and see Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or even Citizen Kane... Or taking my kids out to see ET or Charlie Chaplin or Disney's Fantasia... How cool would that be?!....

(I know - there are probably a hundred technical and legal reasons why not to do this... whatever... I guess the Regal's of the world will just have to die while babbling those excuses before someone like Mark Cuban does this...)

[1] Photo by bubblestar over at Flickr

Free idea - Affiliate links to RSS readers

(note - this post is a bit nuanced, so if you're not into RSS readers, etc you can probably safely skip it... ;-)

Here's a simple and sweet idea I'm giving out for free to all the RSS reader companies in the world. I offered it to Mark Fletcher of Bloglines about a year ago, but haven't seen it implemented yet. I'd really love to see this done by one of the RSS readers/aggregators/whatever they're called:

It seems like the biggest barrier for mainstream adoption of RSS readers is subscribing to that 1st feed. I know this, because I evangelize Bloglines to a lot of people, but then when they finally sign up for an account they're usually clueless about what to do with it next, and why they should even ever use it. 

Now, as a blogger, I'd be more than happy to endorse an RSS reader on my blog so that new users that are wondering what those RSS links do could subscribe to my feed.

But simply linking back to an RSS reader site is pretty much useless for my readers, and doesn't have much value for me (blog owner).

So I thought it would be awesome if I could post a link that "primes" the recommended RSS reader with my WebX.0 feed. So when a new user clicks on my "We love Bloglines!" link they go to the Bloglines signup page. Once their account is active, my feed is already automatically subscribed to. Cool!

Value to me (feed owner) - I easily got a new subscriber. This link is 100x more valuable to me than a stupid link back to the homepage of some random RSS reader site.

Value to user - their account already has one feed they're interested in, making that 1st feed hurdle that much easier.

I think this could be a sweet and cheap (aka - 'viral'...) way to build a lot of affiliate links back to the RSS reader company that does this first. The implementation is probably super simple... they'd just need to add a referring feed URL in the link (something like: www.bloglines.com/signup.jsp?sub=www.webx0.com), and support it in their account setup process.

Please someone do this... you're guaranteed a ton of free incoming links from the blogosphere!

2c

Making money from fantasy sports

A post I wrote a few months ago speculating that Fox would some day acquire a wildly popular fantasy soccer site called Hattrick, has been causing a small global stir in the Hattrick community in the past few days. A reader named chamo summed it up nicely in the comments:

"...After that this blog has and is being commented in all the forums all over the world. Thouthands of eyes have read this article. Im from Peru and we are talking about it."

I thought this might be a good opportunity to get a reader discussion going about a topic that's been intriguing me for a while - How can companies make money from online fantasy sports?

Now the idea is NOT to say - 'we got all these users, now lets slap the game pages with evil ads and make shitloads of money'. That would be stupid. Fantasy sports are all about the passion of the players, so any short term monetization scheme that doesn't chime with the gameplay would fail fairly quickly.

What I'm looking for here are intelligent ways to monetize the game while keeping the players passionate about it. Think long term; Think of elements that integrate with the game play and enhance them; Think of ways beyond the obvious two: banner ads and charging gamers to play.

The rules: If you have any ideas you'd like to share - post them as comments below. Any ideas posted here are free for the world to take and execute on.

FreshDirect Recipes - this could be big

A couple of years ago I had an idea relating to the way we purchase groceries. I thought maybe someday I'll get around to doing it, if no one does before me.

But this week I noticed that FreshDirect have launched a service that's the beginning of what I had in mind. Now that this cat is out of the bag I thought I'd share my full idea with the world here. If this plays out, I think FreshDirect could be onto something big big big[1].

The idea in a nutshell is this:
Most groceries we buy are intended for cooking. Cooking is driven by recipes. The question is - Why is grocery shopping so detached from recipes then?

My idea was: Use recipes as the shopping lists of the future. Let the shoppers decide on a menu, and ship the exact ingredients needed to fulfill that menu. There's so much inefficiency in the process today where the shopper/cooker has to translate the menu to recipes and then to shopping lists, and then to actual buying decisions. Surely a more streamlined and automated process for grocery shopping would be a winner in this space.

If you're scratching your head un-impressed, keep reading... this is where this gets  really interesting:

I think that recipe-driven shopping might be one of the biggest potential cross-promotional opportunities in history.  

Think about this scenario:

• FreshDirect (or whoever may emerge) offers national recipe-driven shopping to shoppers.
• They open an interface for anyone to register recipes with them. Enter your recipe and you get a unique 'Recipe ID'.
• Any time someone buys via your recipe, you get a small cut of the profits.
• FreshDirect also provides you with a unique 'Recipe ID Badge' that you can print next to each recipe. I made one up below (don't try the URL...;-):

Now play this through. Did the light bulb go off??

Recipes has to be one of the most frequently published items in print today. The cookbook shelf at B&N is one of the biggest, and there are hundreds of magazines dedicated to cooking (whether entirely or partially). Not to mention TV shows, websites, etc. However, with the print advertising market declining, this is a slow/no-growth market. 

But what cooking publishers have failed to see is that they own a treasure trove of completely untapped ad media right under their noses - the recipes themselves. It's one of those rare occasions where readers actively consume content with a clear intent of making a related purchase. It's the level of user intent you get when people "read" the yellow pages or use Google. In other words - a perfect advertising media.

Once this is realized (and FreshDirect seem well on their way to do so), a perfect cross-promotion platform is created. Every recipe published in books, magazines, TV, the web, heck - even in restaurants[2], becomes a small revenue generator for its publisher. In return, the whole cooking publishing industry becomes one huge sales funnel into FreshDirect. And unlike some other cross-promotion marketing schemes, this is one where the user is actually benefiting because it perfectly aligns with his initial intent - to purchase the ingredients for the recipes he's looking to cook.

Think about it - A magazine that cover-to-cover is 100% "ad" space, without alienating readers a single bit (on the contrary).

If I were an investor, I would not touch traditional publishing companies with a stick these days. But in the cooking niche there might be a very very bright future. And if publishers understand this, the future of FreshDirect (or whoever emerges as this platform[3]) will be even brighter.

[1] BTW - it's pretty amusing to me that every stupid 'social calendaring tagging video web 2.0 mashup' developed by two college dropouts gets ridiculous amount of publicity in the blogosphere driven by TechCrunch & Co., while real businesses like this get totally ignored... ;-)

[2] How cool would this be? - Restaurants have little incentive to publish their recipes. That's their livelihood, so why give the secrets away? But this dynamic completely changes if a restaurant could make 25-50c each time someone prepares one of their recipes at home. It's a 0 cost transaction and it gives the restaurant potential scale they couldn't have dreamed about achieving in their physical location.

[3] While FreshDirect is the first player to make an entry into this space, it is not necessarily the winner. The key to winning this space is offering grocery shipments nation-wide, and FreshDirect seems far from having the infrastructure to do so at this point.
The importance of the 'national' piece is extremely significant - Publishers of national magazines (ditto TV shows, books, etc) will not start referencing a recipe shopping destination that cannot ship to 95% of the readers, because doing that would alienate most of the readers. So this game is far from over, and I'm sure an arms race will soon start.

Techmeme trackback badges

Techmeme (which I also wrote about here) is a great service for tracking emerging memes on the blogosphere. What's really cool about it is that it does a great job of identifying the significant participants in the discussion around each particular topic. It finds the most legit, prominent and to some extent - even the most interesting - blog posts and associates them automatically to each story.

Trouble is, very few people know about Techmeme.

So I was thinking - given that this 'related discussion' piece is really solid and valuable, why not offer bloggers to add to the footer of each blog post a Techmeme badge that will automatically show links to the most relevant/interesting posts around that topic? Sort of an automation of the trackback mechanism, making it 10x more useful and easier to maintain with the most relevant links.

I will definitely put the 'Techmeme Auto-Trackback Badge' on this blog as soon as it's available.

[UPDATE] - Great post by Tom on the trackback spam problem. One of the byproducts of the excellent Techmeme service is that I have never ever ever encountered a spam link on it. And I hit Techmeme probably 5 times a day.

So I'm wondering about some variation on the theme above - Maybe the solution to trackback spam is some reputation score assigned to each blogger  which would be used for easier (or automated) trackback filtering?

It sure seems like Techmeme has some magical way to avoid spam and show only legit posts. Maybe extracting some "reputation score" and letting the blog publishing tools poll it for each trackback is an even better idea than the one I started with. As eBay has shown us, having a great reputation system in place is an amazing asset to own.

Permanews

[note: this is a slightly edited version of a post I published on Quigo's blog, so if you read both, go ahead and skip this]

Yesterday I posted about the newspaper industry being in it's 'horseless carriage era'. The first newspaper-related idea I want to discuss is one I call Permanews:

Historically, news articles were good for roughly 24 hours, after which a fresh news*paper* was delivered to the reader. But the events reported as news aren't usually confined to that 24 hour cycle - they can go on for weeks or months sometimes (a recent example of this is the war going on in Israel and Lebanon which has been going on for over 3 weeks now).

However, it seems that the short news cycle paradigm, originally dictated by the fact that news was printed on paper and was fully replaced after a day by a new paper, should be revisited when the news is being consumed online. When I read the latest news item about the war on Hizbollah, it's assumed that I have perspective of all the information that preceded it. But that is a false assumption in 99% of the cases. Online publishing therefore shouldn't be confined to the limits imposed by the print side of the business.

The idea of Permanews is to evolve the way rolling news events are covered using the tools and publishing capabilities that online publishing provides us with. A Permanews article would be in a way similar to a Wikipedia entry - constantly evolving and being updated. The Permanews item for a given subject will become the anchor for all new breaking news associated to that topic.

In the example above, the Permanews article may give some historic background about the history of the past Lebanon-Israel conflicts, maps of the region, the timeline of the war, related events, photo gallery, related videos, etc. The breaking news articles will continue covering specific events and developments, but only the ones that are significant on a broader level will be updated on the Permanews article.

A Permanews section can easily be maintained using one of the many wiki apps available with multiple contributors constantly editing it as needed. The cost of doing this is practically zero.

The advantages of Permanews items may be great for a news organization:
- First of all, content that has long life expectancy tends to attract many incoming links, and therefore much traffic. Just like mostly all mentions of books on the web point to their respective Amazon page, and most “referencable” mentions point to the correlating Wikipedia entry, a newspaper can attract incoming links from other websites to its Permanews articles. This is difficult to achieve on small articles with a life expectancy of several hours.

- Permanews can also be great for getting indexed on search engines for the same reasons (long life span, lots of incoming links). Wikipedia would not have been among the top-20 sites in the world had it not been for all the natural search engine traffic it attracts. Newspapers should be the similar traffic attractors for developing news events.

- Permanews can also serve as a great differentiator from other news sources and aggregators. With more of the articles being syndicated from AP and Reuters (=same articles appear on many news sources), having a Permanews section can growingly becoming a useful differentiator in the eyes of the readers.

- Permanews, like op-ed, can provide the added value the users cannot get when they consume their news via news aggregators like Google News.

- Lastly, Permanews can be an easier sell for advertisers who are normally concerned about advertising alongside future news of unknown nature. An article that is more permanent (even if frequently updated and tweaked) is a much easier and safer sell.

Like the idea? - go ahead and Permanews it!

                           

Yesterday I posted about the newspaper industry being in it's 'horseless carriage era'. The first newspaper-related idea I want to discuss is one I call Permanews:

Historically, news articles were good for roughly 24 hours, after which a fresh news*paper* was delivered to the reader. But the events reported as news aren't usually confined to that 24 hour cycle - they can go on for weeks or months sometimes (a recent example of this is the war going on in Israel and Lebanon which has been going on for over 3 weeks now).

However, it seems that the short news cycle paradigm, originally dictated by the fact that news was printed on paper and was fully replaced after a day by a new paper, should be revisited when the news is being consumed online. When I read the latest news item about the war on Hizbollah, it's assumed that I have perspective of all the information that preceded it. But that is a false assumption in 99% of the cases. Online publishing therefore shouldn't be confined to the limits imposed by the print side of the business.

The idea of Permanews is to evolve the way rolling news events are covered using the tools and publishing capabilities that online publishing provides us with. A Permanews article would be in a way similar to a Wikipedia entry - constantly evolving and being updated. The Permanews item for a given subject will become the anchor for all new breaking news associated to that topic.

In the example above, the Permanews article may give some historic background about the history of the past Lebanon-Israel conflicts, maps of the region, the timeline of the war, related events, photo gallery, related videos, etc. The breaking news articles will continue covering specific events and developments, but only the ones that are significant on a broader level will be updated on the Permanews article.

A Permanews section can easily be maintained using one of the many wiki apps available with multiple contributors constantly editing it as needed. The cost of doing this is practically zero.

The advantages of Permanews items may be great for a news organization:
- First of all, content that has long life expectancy tends to attract many incoming links, and therefore much traffic. Just like mostly all mentions of books on the web point to their respective Amazon page, and most “referencable” mentions point to the correlating Wikipedia entry, a newspaper can attract incoming links from other websites to its Permanews articles. This is difficult to achieve on small articles with a life expectancy of several hours.

- Permanews can also be great for getting indexed on search engines for the same reasons (long life span, lots of incoming links). Wikipedia would not have been among the top-20 sites in the world had it not been for all the natural search engine traffic it attracts. Newspapers should be the similar traffic attractors for developing news events.

- Permanews can also serve as a great differentiator from other news sources and aggregators. With more of the articles being syndicated from AP and Reuters (=same articles appear on many news sources), having a Permanews section can growingly becoming a useful differentiator in the eyes of the readers.

- Permanews, like op-ed, can provide the added value the users cannot get when they consume their news via news aggregators like Google News.

- Lastly, Permanews can be an easier sell for advertisers who are normally concerned about advertising alongside future news of unknown nature. An article that is more permanent (even if frequently updated and tweaked) is a much easier and safer sell.

Like the idea? - go ahead and Permanews it!

                           

Wishlist - Gmail-type auto-save everywhere

More and more I find myself writing on web-based applications. Examples - blog posts like this one, company wiki entries, web-based mail, etc, etc.

The risk of losing my work is pretty significant: either by browser crash, windows freezing, dropped internet connection, expired session, involuntary Windows update (urgh!!), etc.

Gmail's auto-save functionality is excellent, and I'm not sure why they seem to be the only ones doing it...I guess there's some real technical difficulty involved.

If so, it would really be great for some web 2.0, AJAXy company to come up with a licenseable version of auto-save functionality similar to that in Gmail. It seems like a large number of apps are going to need this in the next few years...

[update] Ironically, I lost this post twice while writing it on TypePad via a wireless connection. TypePad must have very sophisticated content detection algorithms that kill any item hinting at potential shortcomings it has...

[update #2] I lost this post for the 3rd time. I'm starting to think my conspiracy theories above might actually be true... so I'm not sure this post will ever see the light of day.

[updated #3] OK - it's got to be a conspiracy... TypePad isn't going to support auto-save, and they don't want you to be aware of this problem. Furthermore, they seem to be very aggresive about blocking any mention of this... I can't seem to be able to hack their system to publish this post!! It's usually so easy with posts on 'regular' subjects... last attempt...

Idea: Cooking timer site

Here's an idea for a cool little website, free of charge for anyone who decides to develop it:

Target audience is home cookers. Anyone who's cooked a meal knows how difficult it is to time all the cooking-related activities - when to cut stuff, when to start defrosting, when to put something in the oven, etc, etc.

So the idea is as follows: You upload all the recipes for a meal you want to prepare to the website. You then define the time you have available for preparations and any breaks you need in the middle ('pick up the kid from school - 30 mins').

The site then calculates and optimizes a step-by-step timeline of what you need to do in order to accomplish all the dishes, and have them ready at the perfect timing for serving to the table.

For example:

1:45 - defrost chicken
1:51 - pre-heat oven
1:52 - chop 4 onions
1:57 - melt chocolate
Etc, etc.

A v.2 of this site might also optimize a shopping list for you, combining all the ingredients for all the items on your menu.

Not sure you can make money off it (OK - slap a few Google ads on it...), but I sure would use it!